Hi,
yes, it seems like a good idea. Such a good idea that groups in the WAI
technical activity have been working on it <grin/>.
The Evaluation and Repair Tools group have been hosting the work on EARL (the
Evaluation and Report Language) since early last year. The idea is that tools
produce information in a format that can then be used to identify who made a
given assessment, of what, when, and that the results can be used by other
tools to facilitate repair. It is also possible to turn EARL into a
human-readable format for people doing manual repair.
Tools that produce or use EARL currently include Page Valet (an automatic
testing tool, that produces it and can use it to provide a view of the page
source annotated with the problems identified), MUTAT (a generic
interview-type tool for testing, which produces it), the AccVerify /
AccMonitor / AccRepair suite of tools (which produce it and use it to
generate reports of various kinds, as well as identify problems for the
repair tools that are part of the suite), a query tool from the University of
Bristol that can merge various EARL reports, and SSB's inSight / inFocus
tools (I don't know much about their implementation).
There is an out-of-date home page for EARL - http://www.w3.org/2001/03/earl
and some more up to date information and links from the ERT working group
page http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/#earl
cheers
Chaals
On Tue, 3 Sep 2002, Alistair Garrison wrote:
Dear All,
Would it be a good idea to create a template for a Web Accessibility
Evaluation Report which captures (in a generic format) the procedures used,
and results collected, from the tests suggested in the 'Evaluating Websites
for Accessibility' document
(http://www.w3.org/WAI/EO/Drafts/impl/eval/Overview.html). Effectively, in a
similar manner to the 'Common Industry Format for Usability Test Reports'
(http://zing.ncsl.nist.gov/iusr/documents/cifv1.1b.htm) used for Usability
testing (listed in the Evaluation & Repair section under Related Resources)?
As I see it two clear reasons exist for standardisation, firstly, it allows
anyone undertaking 'repair' work to pick-up, and easily work with, any
evaluation report coming from any Evaluation Centre, and secondly, it
introduces an element of Quality Assurance.
Please let me know your thoughts...
Alistair Garrison